PARALLEL SPEED

The latest GNU compiler provides better support for parallel programming, and GCC also rolls out some new optimization features. We took GCC 4.2 for a test drive.

After much debate and the usual delays, the latest version of the GNU C/ C++ compiler (GCC) has finally materialized. Version 4.2 of GCC [1] follows in the trail of many major and minor changes. For a complete list of changes, refer to the GCC homepage [2].

The most significant change with version 4.2 is support for OpenMP [3], an open standard for program parallelization – especially for systems with shared memory. OpenMP lets programmers specify how the compiler and run-time systems will distribute code segments over multiple threads for parallel execution on multi-core systems.

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